VISIBLE RANKING — ONLINE MARKETING

What to know if you want to maintain your website by yourself?
Part 1: Website maintenance and CMS [Content Management System]

Do-it-yourself website maintenance has multiple purposes: cutting costs, taking control of the online content, speeding up the maintenance process, securing data confidentiality… If you suddenly want to or have to deal with website maintenance, what do you need to know? This article and the subsequent ones hopefully will give you some ideas about website maintenance process.

Website maintenance

I introduced a little bit about web design and development for non-technical people in this article Dreamweaver and MS Word, the purpose of which was to initiate the idea that web design and maintenance may not be as intimidating as you might have thought. I’d recommend that you read that post, especially the first part about “Web design, MS Word & Dreamweaver” if you’re completely new to web related tasks.

Website maintenance simply put is to update your website / web pages with new text content, new images and new links. Web maintenance can be as simple as correcting some spelling errors, changing some images or as complicated as creating a whole new web page on the site.

What makes website update easy is that you just need to learn what and where to update and how to update it. You don’t have to create but rather copy / re-use the code currently used in the web page.

Website maintenance for sites built on a Web Content Management System [CMS]

Lots of today’s websites are built on Web CMS because of the fact that there’re many good, free and open-source CMS readily available to web developers. If your website is built with a Web CMS [ask your web developer if in doubt], all that you need is probably the Log-in information to the Admin area and time to play with that particular Web CMS. One of the main purposes of Web CMS is to make it easy for non-technical people, without coding knowledge/experience, to be able to maintain the website themselves. A decent CMS will let you update your website very easily by using the navigation / menu such as bolding text, inserting images, creating links and so on just like when you’re using MS Word.

> Blogging systems

If you’re using any blogging systems like Google Blogger / Blogpost, WordPress, TypePad… you’ve already got yourself familiar with Web CMS. The blogging software will help do all the coding behind the scene [on the back-end]; you just need to spend some time playing with the [front-end] Interface like the Control panel, settings, menu, navigation… Below is a snapshot of WordPress user interface used for writing a new post or a new page.

 

As seen from above, you can easily bold text by clicking on the [b] button; insert link by clicking on the [link] button; insert image by clicking on the [img] button…. Everything is pretty straithforward, easy to use and front-end. You can also add / edit your page title and page URL in the designated fields.

 

WordPress also lets you know who edited the asset with the date and time stamp, and it can even let you switch to an older version if you want to by just a click on the link. This is a good example of a simple web content management system. More complicated web CMS combines a Web portal like IBM WebSphere Portal and a Content Management System like FatWire Content Server. The combination creates a powerful Web Content Management Systems.

> Web CMS, asset management and categorization

Content Management Systems usually organize / categorize content into different types of asset such as article assets [for text], image assets [for imagery including Flash movies, music and videos], and link assets [for url, including both internal and external links]. All of the assets are stored on a database and can be edited and published individually and independently.

Web Portal usually manages users [their names/ids and rights to access/edit certain areas or to view certain content]; the overall site navigation and hierarchy; site pretty URLs; page set up [including page titles, page unique ids, and portlets]; translation settings.

More about Portlet: Portlet is a way Web Portal uses to divide up a page into different areas for easy control and maintenance. A portlet is like a division or a <div> tag, and a page can have just one portlet, or it can have multiple portlets such as the top portlet [for banner], the 2 body porlets [for the left and right columns], the bottom portlet [for the footer]. Each portlet will be loaded with an asset [id]. If a page has 4 portlets, it should have 4 different assets in use. A portlet is like a container to hold content, and that content comes from a CMS.

If your website is built on a combo of a Web portal and a Content Management System [Web CMS], the maintenance will basically include these steps:

• Look at the page in Web portal [like Websphere Portal] to find out which portlet needs updated, then look for the asset used inside that portlet and get its asset id.
• Go to the Content Management System [like FatWire Content Server] and look for that asset by querying its id number; open, edit, and save the asset. If everything goes well, publish the asset so that your updates will apply to the live environment. The edit part is pretty easy because the asset is written in HTML, and you can either hand-code to edit the content or use the built-in web editor tool to edit it.

Well, that’s it for now. Hope that you can get something out of it. The next posts are going to be about non-CMS website maintenance — tools you need for the job; anatomy of a web page; plus a quick and basic HTML crash course.

Related articles:
Content Management System [CMS]
DYI Website Maintenance - Part 2: Tools you need